Research Guides: WRPR 164: Materiality and Spectacle in 19th C. U.S. (HC) Spring 2022: The Midway, the Circus and the Wild West

Resources in Haverford Special Collections

George Catlin, The manners, customs and condition of the North American Indians.
Catlin was also an artist, and the images of Native Americans which he made on his travels became a traveling exhibit in both the United States and abroad.
McKenney and Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America.
Included are large images of Native American chiefs.
Beadle's Frontier series
These cheap, mass-produced dime novels include a depictions of cowboys and Indians.
The fugitives: or, The Quaker scout of Wyoming
A dime novel.
The king of the winds
A dime novel, by Eugene Sue.
Pony Tracks
By Frederic Remington, 1895.
Circus Performer with Elephant
Cabinet card photograph.
Newcomb's Minstrels
1860s circus streamer
Circus broadside
Circus & theatre. Walnut and Eighth Streets. L.B. Lent, manager
Circus Tricks
Children's books
Laloo Ramparsad
Cabinet card photograph of sideshow performer Laloo and his parasitic twin.
George L. Myers circus scrapbooks
Three scrapbooks of photographs and other materials from the Sells-Floto circus.
Drumm/Mills photo album
Includes images of the circus and a circus parade.
Personal memoirs of a residence of thirty years with the Indian tribes on the American frontiers
H.R. Schoolcraft, 1851.

Collections, Links & Images

Archives from the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
Note in particular the Collections Online that include many digitized objects and texts relating to circuses. See also the Resources tab for additional websites.
Buffalo Bill Scap Book
A family in London whose members knew William Cody personally put together this scapbook about the Wild West Show during its British tours of 1887, 1892 and 1903. A selection of 19 items have been digitized on the John Rylands University Library site.
Circus World's Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center
The online catalog gives you access to digital images of posters, photographs, and artifacts as well as to records for books and collections of papers. See also the library's page for Circus Treasures.
William F. Cody Archive
The archive includes both full-texts and abstracts for primary sources and scholarship. There are also images, film clips and audio recordings.
Circus Route Books
See digitized copies of these circus route books that described the past year's activities of a particular circus company in terms of towns and dates played, performers and acts as well as public interest.

Major Image Collections for U.S. History

American Memory This link opens in a new window
Provides information on, and access to, digitized versions of primary-source collections on American history and culture, including photographs, documents, sound recordings, and motion pictures.
JSTOR Images (formerly Artstor)
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A digital library that provides access to thousands of digital images derived from a variety of museum, library and archival collections. Images support a variety of disciplines including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) This link opens in a new window
The DPLA allows you to search millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the library or other content provider's website.

Flickr: The Commons
Images from many of the world's public photo archives, described by Flickr users so that some are very richly described.
Smithsonian Collections Search
Search over 8.59 million catalog records of museum objects, and library & archives materials. More than 963,000 of these records contain online images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other online resources.

The Midway, The Circus, and The Wild West: Scholarly Studies

Kasson, Joy S., Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York : Hill and Wang), 2000.

McMurtry, Larry,The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the beginnings of superstardom in America (New York : Simon & Schuster), 2005

McNenly, Linda Scarangella, Native Performers in Wild West Shows, (Norman :University of Oklahoma Press), 2012.

Moses, L.C. Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933,(Albuquerque :University of New Mexico Press), 1996

Reddin, Paul, Wild West Shows,(Chicago : University of Illinois Press), 1999.

Hammarstrom, David Lewis, Big Top Boss: John Ringling North and the Circus,(Champaign : University of Illinois Press), 1992.

Daly, Micahel, Topsy : The Startling Story of the Crooked Tailed Elephant, P.T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison, (New York : Atlantic Monthly Press), 2013